favorite recipes from a Northwest kitchen

Category Archives: Soups

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present the next contender in my happy lineup of drab-looking-but-crazy-tasty soups. Oh, what’s that you say? The soup doesn’t look half bad with those perky green bits on there? Well, those are little kale specks that I sprinkled on for the photo because I had no dill or parsley in my fridge. For you, friends, a splash of color, since I have a feeling that all-brown soups, even if deserving, are not adequately appreciated by the food-blog-reading public. (Oh, I crack myself up. It’s hard to take my perceived obligations as a food blogger seriously sometimes. Most times. I mean, I can’t even get into Pinterest.) And those little green specks just scream, “this soup is deserving!”…don’t they? (Do they?)

As an long-time mostly-vegetarian, I know a thing or two about vegetarian feasting in general and the Vegetarian Thanksgiving in particular.

The rules below are mine. What are your ideas or family traditions for feeding the vegetarians on Thanksgiving? Please share your own insights—or feel free to request advice!—in the comments. Continue reading →

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I’m serving soup today, and before you turn your nose up at a creamy celery soup, let me just talk to you about the roasted part of this roasted celery soup. It’s transformative. It’s sublime. It makes me revel in all the things that one humble vegetable can be. Celery is crisp and herbal when freshly sliced. It’s aromatic and powerful when dried. And when roasted, as it is here, celery becomes sweet and deeply flavorful, bringing an earthy umami element to this creamy soup. Aren’t vegetables amazing? Continue reading →

This is a soup with a story. It’s essentially a minestrone, so you might think that our tale is going to start in Italy, with a grandmother tending a simmering pot for hours—and you’d be partly right. Except that this story is about my good friend’s great-grandparents, and the pot was simmering on a stove in a bar in Sacramento, California.

Now, Sacramento has a long history as a drinking town. So from the first days of the California Gold Rush, to the speakeasies of prohibition, to—I can only imagine—the indulgences of today’s state government bigwigs, there has been a steady stream of drinking establishment clients in need of a little something to help them sober up.

Our story, this soup’s story, takes place in the respectable post-prohibition era. So it’s the 1930’s, maybe, and later the 1940’s. The bar is remembered in family lore only as “The Joint,” which may or may not have been its name. It resided within what was, at the time, the oldest standing building in Sacramento. A watering trough waited outside the door for customers arriving by horse and buggy. And my friend’s great-grandparents, the proprietors, always kept a pot of this minestrone soup behind the bar. The recipe, needless to say, has been passed down through the generations. Continue reading →

At this time of year, I have chili on the brain. It’s is basically everything I want in a winter meal: hot, filling, a little spicy, and a perfect vehicle for avocado. I know that in the meat-chili world, there is a beans-or-no-beans question. That question does not exist in my vegetarian chili world. Yes, there will be beans (or, in this case, lentils). Continue reading →

What more do you need to know? It’s a velvety, lightly lemony spinach soup. A nearly-effortless soup. A 15-minutes-to-the-table soup. A vegan soup. A painless way to drink your veggies. And a green, green, green, green soup.Continue reading →

A new dish has come into my life recently. I mean, it’s an old dish, maybe very old, and maybe you’ve been eating it for breakfast or dinner all your life, but I’ve only gotten to know it in recent years. And I’m a little obsessed. It’s called shakshuka.

It’s a Tunisian dish, or an Israeli or a Libyan dish, depending on who you ask. All I know is that I’ve been loving a version from my local bagel shop (which also inspired that caramelized onion hummus recipe). Shakshuka is a mildly spicy stew of tomatoes and peppers, adorned with a poached egg. In this recipe, adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, the eggs are poached right in the tomatoes and peppers, making for a one-pot meal of the most delicious sort.Continue reading →

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Thanks for joining us! Pull up a chair, or balance your computer on the edge of the counter and pull out your pots and pans. Here you'll find recipes for mostly wholesome, mostly vegetarian, always delicious real food. If you like what you see, you can sign up below to receive a daily recipe from emmycooks.com via Facebook, RSS, Twitter, or email.